That is where you are wrong. That would never hold up in court. Upwork can, at any time, choose to delete someones account if they violate the terms of service. No Federal judge would allow a multi-billion dollar corporation to seek punitive damages for freelancers bringing clients off Upwork and vice versa. I would liken it to photo sharing websites and how aggressively they produce advertisements pointed at scaring consumers into using copyrighted images illegally. Court costs alone would cripple such platforms like: shutterstock, depositphotos, etc. This is why they go to such great lengths to scare you into just not doing it.

That is where you are wrong. That would never hold up in court. Upwork can, at any time, choose to delete someones account if they violate the terms of service. No Federal judge would allow a multi-billion dollar corporation to seek punitive damages for freelancers bringing clients off Upwork and vice versa. I would liken it to photo sharing websites and how aggressively they produce advertisements pointed at scaring consumers into using copyrighted images illegally. Court costs alone would cripple such platforms like: shutterstock, depositphotos, etc. This is why they go to such great lengths to scare you into just not doing it.

Well, no federal court would be involved, since the terms we've all agreed to say that any disputes are governed by the laws of the state of Delaware (a common choice because the laws heavily favor corporations) and are subject to binding arbitration. In other words, any dispute would be settled by an arbitrator according to Delaware law with no opportunity for a courtroom trial.

In addition, no one suggested that there might be punitive damages--just actual damages for breach of contract.

It's not at all clear why you'd liken it to photo sharing, since prosecuting those violations would require searching out and identifying placement, then proving that a particular party was responsible for the reproduction, then establishing damages. In this case, the users and clients are registered with full contact information, including banking information, and the damages are established by the terms of the contract.

That's not what she said. She was noting that she wouldn't be surprised if the freelancers she had been using dropped off Upwork.

This is a major problem in this forum and with a lot of customer service people I've had to deal with on Upwork. You people defend your TOS as if it's the Constitution, and it's not. If you think people don't already take their work off the platform, you're naive. And doubling payments and charging clients to pay us besides is guaranteed to accelerate that process. I don't do that because I have special clients outside of Upwork and I have to keep my nose clean, but if I wanted to, it can be done without you ever finding out about it.

Stop being defensive and start looking at it from the perspective of your customers and the market you are in. Last night I looked into four other services and no one charges more than 10%. What you have done is the equivalent of charging $500 for a TV I can buy at Best Buy for $250, of Burger King charging $10 for a Whopper. You'll make more on each one, but how many people will choose to NOT buy.

So I've been on oDesk and then Upwork for many years as a Client hiring freelancers for mostly small jobs. Old 10% fee seemed a bit high, but acceptable considering the ease of finding the right person. Now 20% fee for small jobs plus 2.75% processing fee (that will have to come out of my pocket because any freelancer would just add it to their fee) makes hiring person on Upwork unjustifiably expensive.

The most obvious alternative was always there - is to find a freelancer on Upwork and then use any 3rd party screenshot monitoring software that would track freelancer’s time and screenshots and cost next to nothing. Upwork is obviously acutely aware of such a threat, that is why it is against their policy and they also have added a feature for both clients and freelancers to rat on each other if anyone has offered to use a 3rd party screenshot monitoring app. What they don’t realize is that I have kept the tracking with Upwork not just because it is a rule or was a better app (it is not), but because it was a fair thing to do (well, 5% would be fair IMHO, extra 5% I’ve paid just because I was lasy). Upwork connects clients and freelancers and should be compensated for it. But not 20%!!! This makes me feel robbed and I do not consider it to be a fair fee!

I hope that the feedback they get they will make them to revert this decision. If not, I am not sure what I will do, but I will be looking at alternatives and I feel that many client will do the same and as a result Upwork will collect less money, not more.

You have constantly increased my costs since merging Elance and ODesk.

These new prices are ridiculous. There is no way it costs $25 for you to process 4 paypal transfers per month. Since I will not pay additional amounts to my contractors to cover your increased % I suspect they will no longer want to work for me. Thus, my reliance on your company is about to cost me tremendously in lost productivity and retraining time.

Based on your new prices I will definitely decrease my usage of your service.

In the last 2 ½ years I have paid over $6,500 through your service and recommended you to dozens of friends. That may not be much to you, but I suspect that there are thousands of small users on your site that will feel the same.

That's what I'm worried about most--how much time am I going to lose finding and retraining people? There are so many alternatives to Upwork, finding a new platform isn't a problem, and finding great new people either. I like my current freelancers, though, and we're a great team.

But there's no way I'm paying to pay, and I'm certainly not going to ask them to hand over that much of their fee to Upwork!

That's what I'm worried about most--how much time am I going to lose finding and retraining people? There are so many alternatives to Upwork, finding a new platform isn't a problem, and finding great new people either. I like my current freelancers, though, and we're a great team.

But there's no way I'm paying to pay, and I'm certainly not going to ask them to hand over that much of their fee to Upwork!

Erin, you speak as if you have an ongoing team of people you work with. If that is the case, are there really so many that you've paid less than $500? Once you reach the $500 threshhold with a particular client, the fee drops back to 10%. The maximum that is at risk per freelancer is an additional $50 over the course of your entire relationship if you're starting from zero with that freelancer.

Oh, there's no way I'm ever going to pay Upwork a fee so I can pay someone else. Period. End of story. Not one dime.

When I get the current projects wrapped up, I'm moving to a different platform. It'll suck, but I don't pay fees so I can pay someone.

I don't pay bank fees or ATM fees either, before you ask. :-)

You realize that you pay a fee to a CC company as a merchant, right? That's how they make their money. Some smaller merchants will even discount prices if you pay them cash because they don't have to pay the CC fees.